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2013 APS Award Address: Diane F. Halpern
Our government is broken. Negativity toward Congress is at an all-time high, with hyperpartisanship as the new bigotry in the US. In this address, Halpern will use the lens of psychological science to view the problem and to suggest corrective actions that we can take to reduce it.
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2013 APS Award Address: Elaine F. Walker
Research on the origins of serious mental illness has benefited greatly from advances in developmental neuroscience. With these advances, we now have a clearer picture of the complex interplay between environmental factors and brain development. Contemporary research on the origins of serious mental illness has drawn on this knowledge base and yielded important findings about the confluence of factors that give rise to mental disorders. This presentation will describe the major trends in these new findings and their implications for future perspectives on mental health.
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Increased Meta-Perceptions of Agreeableness and Extraversion Predict Partner Satisfaction
Meta-perceptions are defined as judgments made by the self about what others think about the self. There are certain areas of personality research that may benefit from the use of meta-perceptions in addition to self- or informant-perceptions. This research predicted partner satisfaction from meta-perceptions of personality provided by a representative community sample of 325 romantic couples from St. Louis, Missouri.
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Grit Versus Aptitude: Relative Influence of Effort and Intelligence in Academic Success
In educational research, an age-old question has remained unanswered: Does IQ or hard work matter more in predicting success in school? Intellectual gifts have been studied extensively, but other non-cognitive factors contributing to success have been less carefully examined. One factor is “grit”, defined by Duckworth et al (2007), as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” This research studies the impact of grit, or perseverance for long-term goals and intelligence on middle school students’ GPAs. We hypothesized that change in grit over a span of two years would be a better predictor of GPA than aptitude (New York State Education Department Exams).
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Social Networking in a Graduate Industrial/Organizational Program
While social networks proliferate, insight is lacking about how graduate students, faculty, and administration collaboratively engage such networks. In early 2011, University of Phoenix rolled out what has become the world’s largest, single institution, educational social networking site, PhoenixConnect. The authors examined graduate student, faculty, and administrator contributions and interactions within this university social network. Participants from the graduate program in Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology were given qualitative interviews during bimonthly face-to-face classes to investigate the ways participants from different cohorts used social networking.
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Developing a Clinical Decision Support System
A Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is an application that analyzes complex patient data to help healthcare providers make better clinical decisions. While these tools have been successfully used to reduce medical errors and improve healthcare efficiency, they have not always been embraced by providers. David Albert of Columbia University describes the development of a CDSS designed to help dentists and dental hygienists provide tobacco cessation counseling in the dental office.
